I’ve made a number of bad decisions in my life, some attributable to youth and ignorance, but more are attributable to a simple sense of mortality.

As a child, an adolescent and later a teen, my father would jest “I’ll be surprised if you live to see 30.” As children we’re apt to do with adults, I believed him. He was wise and knowing with the touches of grey at his temples and his big, round, smiling, baby blue eyes.

I have a picture of me in a box somewhere I’ve lost track of, I’m curled up and passed out on his chest in my wee footy pajamas. We were on one of the overstuffed brown leather chairs in our living room, and around us you can make out the red shag carpet, the wood (not wood panel) walls and a few artifacts only family members would recognize. In the picture my father is also K.O.ed – with a book in his hand, and me draped across his shoulder and side like a well worn blanket.

I was a clumsy child (still am. Both clumsy and a child.), which to an outsider may have been what sparked the comment, but it wasn’t. I ran through life with wild abandon and reckless enthusiasm. Through my 20’s – after he left me – I did more of the same. I was at life’s Suck Buffet, trying a little of everything: dating/marrying men who didn’t respect me, spending too much money on things that didn’t matter, jogging/walking solo at night on dark city streets in questionable neighborhoods. Mostly though, I ran from ghosts.

I finally turned 30 and held my breath. With eyes clamped shut so hard my nose wrinkled, I peeked with one eye, hoping I’d see it coming. I didn’t, and next came 31, and 32 and 33. I was still waiting for it. When I found my first lump/got the flu/had a toothache I though it was his prophecy. It wasn’t, and I came to understand this: I’m wrong a lot.

What the lump was, what his joke turned scar was, is this: a point of clarification. Live with intent. Choose carefully. Be kind – to yourself and to others.

I listened, though the truth is I’m still waiting for “it”, 6 years after 30. It’s lingering around like that final utility bill from years ago that hasn’t caught up to you yet but remains in limbo, angry and unpaid.

Until it tracks me down, I’ll be out here somewhere. Chasing dreams, smiling so big you can probably count my nose hairs and going on measured but daring adventures. I frequently imagine my father peeking out from around corners at the most perfect times and winking.

I get it.

What: The Hostel in the Forest
Where: Brunswick, GA
Price: $25/night pp, 3 night max.
Reservations: Don’t bother emailing or looking at their website just call. 912-264-9738
Amenities: Treehouses (!!!), labyrinth, outdoor showers, ducks, lake, natural pool, sweat lodge, roosters & chickens, quiet paths, fresh air, camp fires. Bring your musical instruments, there’s almost always an after sunset jam followed by a group swim in the lake.
Other: Composting sawdust toilets, only to be used for “deposits”. If you have a shy bladder/bowels, IBS, or body shame, this isn’t the place for you.
Likelihood of a return visit: 100%
Distance from Atlanta: Approx 304 miles
Time to visit: Mid to late summer when the skeeters are dying down but it’s still warm enough to sleep without blankets and skinny-dip.

Saturday

We lolled about after waking lateish and shuffled off for breakfast at a truck stop complete with Princess Phones (which, btw, was something I’ve always wanted to do) and plenty of coffee. Back to the hostel under threats of another MN hissy fit, we read and played mancala and cards until I think G & K’s heads were going to explode.

They went foraging for lunch while I poured a drink, opened the screen door to welcome the rain and launched bloom on my iPhone (which you should totally download RIGHT NOW. I’ll wait.)

It’s the most relaxed I’ve been in ages.

The sky booming and shaking, the splatter of the drops on the canopy of green, the quieting of the little buzzards trying to ruin my life, the air cooling and thrusting itself into my lungs, the green becoming so amplified it was electric…

I wanted to soak it all up and in and roll around in it so the stink on my skin would never leave and I’d have something more to remember it by.

I wanted to share it with you, but it slipped through my heart and evaporated. I don’t suppose it was meant to be shared, it was what the postcards are about…”wish you were here…” because my words and imagery will never do it justice.

The girls came back and fed me, and we resumed our reading/gabbing/joking.

Eventually, the dinner bell rang (what we can only assume was an hour before dinner) and we scurried down to the netted mess hall to play friendly with the other guests and the staff.

While our meal and the company were both delicious and delightful, it’s what came next that makes my heart melt. The sun fell, dusk settled, and the temperatures started to cool. It was our final night, and I wasn’t going to leave without swimming in the lake, and out to the hammock in the floating dock and floating at least a few minutes away under the stars…so I did.

There was a mist on the water from the temperature change that made it haunted and mystic and surreal. I wished for my camera and closed my eyes on the image. It’s still there, with the reeds around the banks of the lake and the bench swing where my clothes hung disappearing and reappearing in the light the nearly full moon provided.

Between the chatting and admiring the night there were long pauses of silence, where I could close my eyes and devour the stillness. I did it until I was full and as my weight shifted the cold air would hit my wet skin. It was time to crawl through the water back to the shoreline and tuck in, marking the last night and the end of another magical memorable trip to the treehouses at our hostel in the forest.

As my eyes finally closed an hour or more later, I promised myself again to come back. Maybe alone and definitely when it’s raining.

Friday

The following morning we found the weather was uncooperative at best, and after trucking it over to Jekyll Island for what we hoped to be a day with our books and our toes in the sand, but were foiled by big ugly red blotches on the radar that were circling us like The Jets. Or The Sharks. Whichever ones were the complete bungholes.

The lack of sunshine lead us to a dockside bar just outside the Jekyll Island Club, becuase really: cocktails make everything better on a girlie vacation. Something else that make everything better? Snapping shots, which my lovlies were patient enough to tolerate.

I can’t say enough about traveling with people who have a similar mindset about what a vacation is. There was no pressure to stay at our table and sip my naughty frothy adult beverage when I wanted to be down the dock shooting the end of a frayed rope. I sipped, I talked, I wandered, I shot, I sipped more, and then My Aunt arrived. That bitch.

Eventually we decided we weren’t going to let Mother Nature and her menopausal episodes (this reference is actually about the weather, I’m not always talking about my uterus) foil our plans. We got back in the Griswold family truckster and headed for St. Simons, we found a tide that dampened our towels and our bottoms but not our spirits. Gwen broke out the limes, Kel broke out the beer, I broke out my leatherman and we made our own perfection.

When the water finally crept up on our toes and chased us away, we traveled back to Jekyll and a place I’d been with The Mc. Correction: a place we’d gone, then left, because the hostess seated a table of children next to us while their parents sat further away and I had a melt down. We never did eat there, but I remembered it so there we were…at Sea Jay’s.

There we were, on the porch, looking out over the water and the slips with boats tied up and the underbelly of the bridge. There we were, sipping our drinks and contemplating our meals when a raccoon walked across the lawn. I’m not sure if all raccoons walk like this guy, but he moved a little like Forest Gump when he had the leg braces on. Didn’t stop the little fella from climbing up the tree closest to the diners and giving us all a sweet faced silent plea for scraps, though.

Dinner was devoured and it was on to the one and only appointment we had during our vacay: a turtle walk. After those crushing blows were delivered last month and my attempts to swim with turtles were thwarted by the H1N1, Gwen quietly slipped into uber considerate friend mode and made arrangements for us – and for me – to have a possible turtle sighting.

While our walk was not fruitful, we had an hour long stroll on the shoreline under the stars (I’d nearly forgotten what they looked like) and a moon that lit up the night so well there wasn’t a need for any man-made interference. The cooling sand, the salty air, the friends nearby but doing their own thing, and that moon and those stars…it was like a big sloppy kiss from the heavens.

If there’s anything that fresh air does, it’s wear you out. We drove back to the hostel mostly in silence, grabbed everything we’d need that night and scurried to our treehouse, hoping we’d outrun the skeeters.

We didn’t.

Thursday afternoon

Information I was exposed to after the fact that may or may not have been more helpful before the fact:
- Vitimin B1 taken a day before and every day will keep mosquitoes at bay.
- DEET is your friend.
- After several years of drought in a marsh like area, and when rain has been recently abundant, you are wise to just stay home, or indoors, or drunk.

We frolicked and giggled and caught up on the five hour drive from Atlanta to Brunswick, through the rain and over the most boring major roadway known to man: I-16 between Atlanta and Savannah. It’s boring not only because of a lack of stopping points, not only because of all the lush green (oh, the HUMANITY) and not only because of the straight roadway. It’s infinitely more boring because of the well known speed traps. One solution for this is cruise control, the other is tying a string between your steering wheel and your gear shift and taking a nap.

Obviously, that’s not an option, and our girl Gwen did a fine job returning us to the place of our bonding and our disco-tent (that’s for you, Kel), the place where we became The Hostile/Hostel Girls, the place where we may have shared too much, but felt safe enough to share as much or as little as we liked.

We arrived in once piece, just as a lecture on transcendentalism or something was wrapping up that most of the visitors were attending. We waited in the main dome with our offerings of rosemary and sage plants and a box of quinoa and and tea and organic/fair trade/rain forest certified java, and Dr. Bonners. There also may have been some men’s swimtrunks in there, though I’m still not sure how or why. Eventually – as expected – we were greeted by a lovely, smiley, adorable, barefoot young woman who gratefully took our $25/night pp lodging fare and showed us to what would be our home for the next three days.

Our loft in a tree held a few extra special isosceles triangle windows, a half circle window, a screen door and holes in the floor boards (just big enough to let in insects that could survive a nuclear war, ifyouknowwhatImean). There were words etched on walls and paintings on other walls left behind by previous visitors, there were shells lined up on a window sill and a notebook and pen, there was an incense holder and there were many dream catchers and from our perch 15feet above ground, there was good juju.

Looking back, we had no idea just how much time we’d spend within those walls.

Late Thursday evening after hauling a round of bags to the treehouse, we ventured into Brunswick for dinner. Traveling over the big bridge that The Mc loves so much, we fell onto her sleepy streets. Most spots were closed by the time we landed in a parking spot and ogled the stray cats that were being fed on her city streets by local shop owners.

Eventually we found an open locale with tapas and live music called Pranzo Portside, and a lovely waitress named Barbara who was unfazed by this pack of city dwellers who lumped themselves at one of her tables when she was probably already winding down for the night. Nary an attitude was had from this lovely creature, as she loaded us up with wine and noms.

Smelling sweet and ripe and upon arrival back at the castle, we were devoured. Nearly carried off by mosquitoes who had mated with roaches to be abundant in number and impossible to escape. During the two minute walk from the car to the tree house, we sustained what must have been 20 bites between the three of us, and that’s a conservative estimate.

We fell into our respective beds wearing coats of Calamine we’d hoped would get us through the night.

I didn’t warm up to Anne Lamott immediately when a friend loaned me a copy of her book Bird by Bird, but when I picked up Traveling Mercies last year all that changed. The way she spoke with raw honesty – the kind that you can feel on your skin – oh it grabbed me and shook me around like an abused Raggedy Ann.

Plan B had more in common with the former than the latter for me, but now there was a different context: a relationship. She was someone who knew my secrets and I knew hers. We didn’t judge each other as my eyes danced over her words . She continues to go along before me, stumbling so I don’t have to and reminding me to embrace it all.

There were a few especially beautiful and a few especially witty things that forced me to dog ear pages as I blazed through. I meant to write them down for myself, knowing I’d never look back at them…and since changed my mind. I’m going to share them with you.

“I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had sum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert,. So this informs how I live now.”

Did I mention I’m going back to The Hostel in the Forest this weekend with my girls to skinny dip in the moonlight and make s’mores and drink from mason jars by the fire? It’s about more than a simple weekend away. When you’re isolated from rush-rush and surrounded by green and friends and love and fresh air, it’s easy to be kind to yourself, but it’s a step.

“I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone was glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season – too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled and makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much works at all.”

I believe I’ve hit my fall. I believe I dreaded it for some time, that I’d feel somehow used up. Dry. Weathered. I believe I’m less worried about that lately, and that she made it poetry.

“She had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but when she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy – she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition.”

Alright this one killed me, because it’s true. She has a similar line earlier in the book where she’s listening to a sermon.

“She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, and that we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justic, equality, mercy and then we despise people also created in God’s image, who are Her children, too. ”

and a bit later

“This drives me crazy, that god seems to have no taste, and no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.”

She’s right. My seester recently had a runin with a Crazy Christian, an old friend who had even stayed in her home recently. It made me embarassed, it made me want to hide my faith. I’ve wanted to hide my faith a lot since I found it a few years ago all dusty and pale from living in a closet and/or the shadows of justification. *shrug* I guess all I can do is be me and let you be you and hope that’s enough to show you we’re not all bat shit bonkers.

Related: I’m going to work on reintroducing the word “mallarky” into my vocabulary in place of “bullshit” as phase 1 of a many part plan to stop embarrassing myself in front of little people and their parents.

Practice, practice, practice.